Post navigation

A Lecture By North Korea Scholar Andrei Lankov

I recently had the privilege of attending a lecture by North Korea scholar Andrei Lankov. The speech was intended to be a primer on North Korea and he set out to clear up some of the major misconceptions people have about the country. “If you look at everything which is written about North Korea,” he opened, “you get a fairly bad picture of a crazy country: absolutely irrational, completely unpredictable, and very, very dangerous.” Over the course of his speech, not only did he prove these things to be quite the opposite, he also gave some insight into the current situation inside North Korea and how things have been slowly changing. Dr. Lankov’s speech lasted about 45 minutes and covered a great deal of material, but what follows is information that I personally found to be most insightful and challenged my own ideas.

First of all, he said that those officials in the Kim Il-sung era of the ‘60s and ‘70s were not that rich. Many people get the idea that North Korea was much like the South American dictatorships of the time, where there were a small handful of extremely rich people with a very poor majority. Instead, Dr. Lankov described a North Korea where the typical elite would receive about 700 grams of rice from the government and eat meat about once a week, and the average worker would get about 350 grams of rice and 350 grams of corn, pork a few times a year, and fish every month. I have to say that this surprised me as I assumed that severe equality is almost inherent to these types of regimes.

Secondly, Dr. Lankov also went on to describe some of the liberalization that has been happening in recent years. While up until the mid 1990s three generations of family members were sent to prison if you commit a crime, now your family is usually spared. While the family of a prisoner would probably be exiled or disgraced, they usually will no longer go to prison. He also stated that contrary to much of what is reported, the last five to ten years of North Korean history has been a time of gradual economic improvement. It was only the years of Arduous March in the 1990’s that were truly disastrous for the country. I found this interesting because I tend to see a lot of conflicting reports on the state of North Korea’s economy currently. The problem might be the fact that news outlets tend to focus on micro trends and very recent developments instead of looking at the broader picture. But he did say however that he doesn’t expect many reforms in the future. The Kim regime believes that change or liberalization could be extremely detrimental to their power, and that they are probably entirely correct about this. He expects that because people now know more about the outside world and are less indoctrinated, even if Kim Jong-eun makes gradual reforms, his time in power is limited.

He also spent a lot of time talking about China’s role and how we often get a skewed picture of the situation because China tends to be demonized by the American press. He said that it has only been in the last three years that North Korea has started to reestablish a secured border with China and to crack down on smuggling and illegal migration, and that the border between North Korea and China has been largely unprotected for at least 20 years. He also stated that there is still no control over the Chinese side of the border, and that the brutal crackdowns on North Korean immigration by the described in the American press tends to be grossly overstated. Rather, the Chinese are not particularly enthusiastic about finding and deporting North Koreans living in China as long as they keep a low profile. Hearing this came as a bit of a shock as this situation is typically painted as one of the big human rights issues of the day.

Overall, the takeaway was that while the situation in North Korea is dire, they are probably more demonized than they really should be. Simply, “they’re playing a risky game and see no exit. North Korea is riding a hungry tiger… maybe it was a bad idea to start the ride, but back then this tiger looked very nice. You can’t say that someone is strange or weak because that person managed to sit on a hungry tiger for a few decades and is still sitting.”